Covering news decades ago in Moscow, I saw KGB thugs pummel protestors. I met Mikhail Gorbachev. I was sneaked in the darkness of a winter night, blindfolded part of the way, to interview a dissident.
But none of those is my most arresting Moscow memory. Just one man is. One man on a sunny Sunday, crawling along the bank of the Moscow River on his hands and knees, furtively glancing over both shoulders with every movement, just to whisper a warning to another journalist and me. A warning about hoses frayed at the fire station where he worked, the station tasked with protecting the Kremlin. Nothing dishonest, nothing seditious, just an effort to get word out that a fire station needed new hoses.
But he knew, if the authorities didn’t like it, he’d pay a price.
That’s how it was, living in the Soviet Union.
Is Russia today any better? The answer is an unambiguous “sort of.”
On the one hand, the Russian people now can openly speak their minds. Sort of. They can publicly assemble. Sort of. They have access to diverse media. Sort of.
On the other hand, they used to tell journalists like me, in whatever ways they could, how much they yearned for freedoms like ours, and then, when the Soviet Union crumbled, they got them. But in the long span of time, democracy lasted only for a nanosecond. Once Vladimir Putin took power, he slowly shrank those short-lived gains. He had been promoted from the apparatus of the Soviet state. He knew nothing else.
Which probably explains Russia today. We know, from the pitiable case of Putin’s political nemesis Aleksei Navalny— the man who survived Putin’s poison— that they still have gulags. The headline of a New York Times report early this month was, “Navalny Sent to Notoriously Harsh Prison,” and the subhead was a stunner: “Convicts in the isolation unit at Penal Colony No. 2 are forced to stand for hours with their hands clasped behind their backs, forbidden to make eye contact with the guards.” Shades of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s experiential exposé of Stalin’s camps for political prisoners.
We also know, from a U.S. intelligence report declassified just yesterday, that Vladimir Putin (once again) empowered efforts to influence our 2020 election toward Donald Trump. “Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests,” according to the report, “worked to affect U.S. public perceptions in a consistent manner.” Translation: they worked to smear Biden. No wonder. Sometimes Trump seemed so willing, as The Guardian put it, “to parrot anti-western propaganda”— he once gave more credence to the word of his bromantic partner Putin than to the intelligence of his own government— it was hard not to notice that Putin was gaming Trump.
When it comes to the rivalry with its Cold War nemesis, the United States of America, Russia is still in the fight.
This is no surprise. I covered rallies in post-Soviet Russia where President Putin told his people, “We were a superpower once, we will be a superpower again.” Old habits die hard.
Overseas Putin is reaching out, and it isn’t toward us. Witness Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, Libya, and illiberal allies from the old Soviet bloc like Hungary and Poland. At home, as President Biden correctly has characterized it, Putin is driving his nation into a new era of authoritarianism. Witness Aleksei Navalny in his modern-day gulag.
You could accurately argue that Russia today is not nearly as bad as the Soviet state that preceded it. You could also argue that it is headed back in that dark direction.
But what can we do about it? At the end of the day, precious little. Sanctions? They sometimes pack a paltry punch. Particularly when the reality of realpolitik keeps us from slapping them on the man at the top of the food chain.
Anyway, when you look at sanctions we’ve leveled elsewhere against authoritarian leaders and their nations, it is the nations’ economies and the welfare of their citizens who hurt the most, not the leadership. Bringing a democratic nation to its knees would force change. But by definition, when a nation’s leader is authoritarian, the welfare of the people is not high on his list of priorities.
You can also turn the nation into a pariah… unless it already is one. When a pariah is allied with other pariahs, what are you achieving?
Most of the time these days, our focus is on other potential threats, China first among them. But we best not look away from Russia. People could soon be on their hands and knees again, looking over both their shoulders before they talk. Putin has plans. We’re only in his way.
Not that there’s much we can do to lift his people up. Maybe our only weapon is to model democracy, or as Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared, “incentivize democratic behavior.” If we do it right, no one does it better.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.”He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published on BoomerCafe.com.
Pretty scary Greg, it confirms what I have concluded about Russia under Putin, and adds information I was not aware of. Oops, a dangling participle. It is difficult to find an objective assessment of current Russia, especially in view of all of the misinformation that we received about it during the trump administration. There doesn't appear to be any immediate solution and I agree that the most we can probably do is to model democracy internationally as well as in our own country where almost half of the people don't appear to care about whether we have it or not. We desperately need enhanced education at all levels about the history of our democracy that I fear today's generation(s) haven't had, they know not what they have compared with other forms of government. We have a long road ahead and have to rely on the resilience of democracy that we've historically enjoyed; I hope we can keep it. Thanks for your insights. Semper Fi - Dave Dillingham